The Simple Gift of Light #4
You can skip reading this post if the stress of the workday falls off your shoulders and you find relaxation easily when you return home. This post is for the rest of us.
Perhaps you work at home or away and juggle responsibilities or push your body physically all day long. Perhaps you carry children from place to place, grab groceries, cook meals, and carry a mental task list a mile long. Or perhaps you do all of the above, somehow.
I suppose you could even be retired and on the golf course, but no matter what you do with your days, your body and your mind need to relax before your body and your mind are ready for sleep.
By now you have likely caught on to my pattern. Light can help you relax easily, when you get the right light in the right place at the right time.
Here’s a reality that will surprise no one: bright, harsh overhead fluorescent lights are not your best shot at relaxation. Somehow, however, we are turning to their LED replacements in the form of wafer lights to illuminate our homes, effectively confining ourselves to institutional lighting that itself is expressly designed to keep us productive.
In other words, the light you have at home is probably doing exactly the opposite of what your body and mind need at the end of the day.
So what’s the big deal? Most of us deal with a near-constant flow of stressors throughout our days. We deal with stress at work, driving home is stressful (even when we don’t notice, our heartrate often rises around automobiles), perhaps getting dinner on the table is stressful. Even our weekends can deliver stressful situations from negotiating family dynamics to the “Sunday Scarries” that come as we think about the week ahead.
If we can reduce our stress, we can receive countless benefits from improved mental health to better sleep. Relaxation and rest can reset our brains that leads to more creativity and higher productivity later. Less stress can improve our mood and help us relate to others better. Lower stress on your body and heart can literally help you live longer.
We need to relax. Siesta. Sabbath. Naptime. Downtime. Vacay. We have many names for the various ways humanity attempts to regularize rest, but very few terms for what needs to happen at the end of the day. Happy hour and “unwinding” are the only ones that come to mind.
Perhaps we need a new term for daily relaxation. How about Evenslow, Clockout Calm, the Sunset Slowdown, or the Campfire Calmdown? Hearth Hour? (Yes, I did ask ChatGPT to help me brainstorm ideas.)
I like Sunset Slowdown and Campfire Calmdown because they both get the lighting right: warm, dim, and low. Our bodies crave sunsets and campfires for relaxation, not cold, bright fluorescent or LED light.
I was curious about campfires so I went looking for research proving that fires have a soporific, calming effect on us and found an NIH abstract that seems to have been quoted in a million other places. According to the study, “findings confirm that hearth and campfires induce relaxation as part of a multisensory, absorptive, and social experience.”
Chances are you do not need me or a research study to believe that the crackle of a cozy fire can help you relax- I’m’ betting you have experienced it yourself somewhere. I enjoy camping on crisp fall evenings in large part because the only entertainment is tending and watching a fire as the sky grows dark. My previous homes all had working fireplaces (this one does not), and I miss the glow of fire so much that we added a fake fireplace (it’s nice, but nothing like the real thing).
The comfort of a fire is so strong that many hotel lobbies and restaurants have them, beautiful custom homes have more than one, and a popular backyard feature is the fire pit or fire bowl. Most of us have no practical need for fire, but thousands of years of conditioning are hard to overcome.
For reasons unknown to me, I seem to have fallen into a habit of creating scientific-looking charts that are markedly unscientific in an attempt to illustrate my point, and this post did not escape the trend.
Chart A illustrates our lives under electric light: we have lights on all day, we go home and suddenly have lights on all evening (sometimes less bright than at work, hopefully), and then we go from bright to dark with the literal flip of a switch. It is constant light all day and sudden darkness at bedtime. This does not work – if you look at Chart C, our stress levels have no natural triggers to lower when our light stays the same. Instead, many of us drug our body in some way to relax. Glass of wine, anyone?
Chart B, on the other hand, shows what I experience when I go camping and what our ancestors experienced every single day, all year long, for their entire lives. Light was bright at noon and then gradually, gently, inevitably grew dimmer and darker until stars appeared in the night sky. This natural light, combined with the warm dancing light of a fire, caused our bodies to produce sleep hormones and occupied our brain in a calming fashion.
Sure, light that helps you relax easily will not solve the world’s problems or make all of your stressors disappear. But it will help.
Why is this subject worthy of an entire post? Because almost all of us are getting it wrong. We go home, prepare dinner in a kitchen lit with bright overhead lighting, eat it at a table with bright overhead lighting, and move the couch with bright overhead lighting. Worse, we put the light in the middle of each room so there is no safe place to sit without looking at the bright source of glare. If we have wafer lights, it can be even worse.
If your idea of relaxation is the doctor’s office, this may work for you. If your idea of relaxation is watching a sunset over the ocean, you really could not get further from it.
I am talking a lot about fires (Campfire Calmdown?), but natural light works the same way. The Sunset Slowdown shows us a very warm orange-red sun barely above the ground (and then slipping below the ground). The angle of sunlight changes dramatically at day’s end, coming from down low, along with the color and intensity. It dims down, it warms up, and it comes from low in the sky.
This could be our indoor lighting, too. Dimming it down is a big start; warming up the color temperature (I find that 2200°K is a nice feel for me) gets us closer. Then turning off nearly all of the overhead light (with the possible exception of lights aimed at artwork) will get us a much more relaxing vibe. Candles and real fires help, but they are not necessarily practical.
Achieving the Sunset Slowdown is another reason I am a fan of table and floor lamps, especially when paired with warm-colored shades. If you can dim them down, and use warm-dimming lightbulbs, you can get an incredibly relaxing feel.
At the end of each day, we all need to shift out of work mode so our brains and bodies can rest and reset. Light can work against us when we are flooded with bright, overhead, crisp white light, constantly sending us the “it’s noon, get to work” signal. On the other hand, we can achieve Sunset Slowdown or Campfire Calmdown when we warm up our lighting, dim it down, and choose fixtures closer to the ground.
I am getting weary of saying “this isn’t rocket science,” but even simple solutions like these are rarely enacted. If you want to relax easily, use some of your daytime energy to change your lighting.